


hope i'm not tired of rebuilding (cause this might take a little more)

by stark2ash



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Bruce Banner Is a Good Bro, Depressed Tony Stark, Depression, Gen, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Insomnia, Major Depressive Episode, Medication, Mental Breakdown, Mental Health Issues, Overworked Tony Stark, Past Pepper Potts/Tony Stark, Self-Hatred, Steve Rogers Is a Good Bro, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide Attempt, Tony Stark Angst, Tony Stark Has Issues, Unintentional overdose, but it will be okay, for some reason, he just wants to be warm, no character death i swear, steve makes hot chocolate like 4 separate times, they're all out here trying their best, tony is having a rough time okay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-18
Updated: 2021-01-18
Packaged: 2021-03-16 02:41:01
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 12,791
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28823880
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stark2ash/pseuds/stark2ash
Summary: It should be simple, right? Psychiatrist writes a prescription, Tony gets better, and everyone can forget about what happened.Side effects may include: trouble sleeping.Things aren’t always as easy as they seem.
Relationships: Bruce Banner & Tony Stark, Steve Rogers & Tony Stark, Tony Stark & Avengers Team
Comments: 10
Kudos: 97





	1. dormiveglia (n.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- the state between sleeping and waking
> 
> trigger warnings in end notes

Tony leaves the psychiatrist’s office with a prescription and his first feeling of hope in a long time. Just one pill a day, the doctor said, and he would feel more energetic, more motivated, more able to wake up in the morning and not want to go immediately back to sleep. It wouldn’t solve the trauma or the anxiety, but it would solve a problem he had been battling long before Afghanistan.

The first week is fine, a little better than most, but he’s been trying a little harder lately. Bruce is a near constant in his lab, reminding him to drink and eat and sleep at the appropriate times. He works out with Barton, upgrades the suits, and shares popcorn with Steve during their weekly movie night.

The second week drags. He spends 34 hours straight in the lab, popping the pill when JARVIS reminds him because if he’s going to be on medication, he can at least be on time with it. Bruce doesn’t say anything when he finds three separate miscalculations in his work, or when Tony stares at a screen for two hours without saying a word, and he can feel his eyes burning into his back. And Tony knows that this is what he was doing three weeks ago, before the incident that landed him in the psychiatrist’s office in the first place.

He goes back to the doctor on Friday for a check-in, and they double his dose.

-

JARVIS is constantly monitoring him now, so he’s notified that his heart rate is too high a half hour after taking the first pill. “Yeah, J, I clocked that myself.” He’s in the lab again with Bruce, who looks at him curiously. “Probably the old ticker acting up again. Or side effects or something.” He taps the scars on his chest, where the arc reactor used to be. His breathing feels tight, almost heavy, but not like an anxiety attack. “Maybe a cold. It’s been chilly outside lately.” He doesn’t think much of it until he’s lying in bed that night, trying to sleep with his heartbeat loud in his ears.

_Side effects may include headache, weight loss, dry mouth, trouble sleeping, nausea, and elevated heart rate._

The bottle’s label clears everything up from him, and he does some breathing exercises he’s seen Bruce do after missions. The doctor said that side effects usually faded after the first week or so, so he’s hopeful that he’ll only have to deal with it a little while longer.

In the meantime, he’s not going to sleep any time soon.

The heartbeat thing goes away after a few days, so that he just gets a little burst of energy for the first hour or so that fades into some tingling across his chest as the day goes on. Pepper keeps reminding him about impending deadlines and projects that he needed to finish, and for the first time, he has the energy to work on them. Stark Industries pushes out a new virtual reality app, a line of mini solar panels for camping, and a short online course for building a rudimentary AI (narrated by Tony Stark, which turned out to be a great marketing tactic). He gives dozens of talks across the country, hands out scholarships to dozens of particularly bright young individuals, and watches as Pepper watches him out of the corner of her eye. She doesn’t leave him alone in public, even with the security team that protects his every move. They have their own rooms in the hotel suite, but a door connects them and she leaves it open at night. It’s not ideal for either of them, still finding a new normal after the breakup months ago, but he knows that the incident made everyone wary.

They get back to the tower after a long week of PR, and she wishes him good night as Happy drops him off at the tower. He takes his private elevator up to his floor, practically falls into bed, and waits for sleep to come.

And waits.

And waits.

And waits, but he’s never had trouble falling asleep before (the issue always seems to be the nightmares), and he’s been on his feet for almost two days straight, so something’s different. His body is exhausted, and he can feel the physical strain he needs to recover from, but mentally, he feels more energetic than ever.

The end table next to his bed holds a rarely used bottle of melatonin, and he rolls over and swallows one dry. He gets up and takes a warm shower, because maybe he needs a few external cues to realize that it’s time to be unconscious for a few hours. Unpacks some of his luggage. Touches his toes a few times, just to show himself that he can. Gets back into bed, feeling more tired than before, and waits.

And waits.

Pepper wakes up to a stack of signed paperwork and an update for the new app.

He’s hoping the team doesn’t notice his rapidly changing bedtime routine, but if they do, no one says anything. Bruce is delighted when he joins him for an hour of evening yoga to calm down. JARVIS doesn’t comment when he asks him to shut down all his electronics at 10:30 every night. Nat raises her eyebrow but spars with him at night when he’s trying to get all his energy out. Clint is more than happy to give him feedback on the automatic targeting system for his arrows, and doesn’t question when Tony asks him to stay so he can change components in real time. And they all help, a little, but he still stares at the ceiling for hours every night until sleep takes him.

Out of all of them, he thinks Steve is the most well-adjusted when it comes to a functional bedtime, but it’s a mere hypothesis until they run into each other in the kitchen at five in the morning; Steve holding his running shoes, Tony with dark circles and a cup of tea.

Steve slips his shoes onto his feet while looking at Tony questioningly. “You’re up early.” Tony laughs a little under his breath, and Steve straightens, looking concerned. “Late?”

“Believe me, I’m not trying to be.” His tongue feels heavy in his mouth, and he can tell that his words are starting to slur together from exhaustion.

Steve’s eyebrows furrow together, and he looks at the cup in Tony’s hand. “You shouldn’t be drinking.” Tony laughs again, and offers him the cup, watching as Steve takes in the tea bag still hanging over the rim. “Does Bruce know you’re in his stash?” He tries and fails to project a lighthearted tone, and Tony can hear some concern laced through his words. He’s too tired to dissect it, though.

“I’ll buy some more.” He tries to sip the tea nonchalantly, but his hands are shaking from exhaustion.

“Tony, you look like you’re one foot in the grave,” Steve says, and then freezes. Tony looks at him, barely registering what he said, until he sees the half-hidden wince.

He shrugs and smiles, all teeth and dark circles and defensive eyes daring Steve to make another comment, and pours the rest of his tea into the sink. “I’ve pulled a few late nights in my time, Cap. It’s nothing to worry about.” And it isn’t. So after Steve leaves for his run, Tony shuffles down to the lab and stares at lines of code until he passes out on his desk.

He averages about four hours of sleep a night for the next week before he realizes that he should try to do something about it. It’s really not _that_ terrible, he’s had worse, but there’s the whole “getting better” thing that’s supposed to be happening, and JARVIS keeps pulling up his calendar with his next doctor’s appointment on it at the worst times, so he tries fixing it. Melatonin doesn’t work; if anything, it makes him more awake. He plans on looking up (or funding) studies on sleep hormones and the placebo effect, because something weird is going on with that.

He’s had some success with alcohol in the past, but he’s been sober for almost a year now and the psychiatrist had been very clear that mixing his meds and alcohol could lead to some nasty side effects, so he clears that option out of the way.

If he were taking the pills in the late morning, it would make sense that he would stay up later, but he’s been taking them at 8 am every day. Most sleeping drugs had bad interactions with the medicine, so those were out too. As he rummages through his medicine cabinet, he finds the old bottle of his lower dosage that still has two weeks of pills left. The ones that didn’t kick start his insomnia into hyperdrive.

The next morning, he takes one of those instead.

-

When he checks in with his psychiatrist, he doesn’t exactly bring up that he’s mismanaging his medication. He doesn’t feel as down anymore, his energy levels are up, and most days feel more neutral instead of awful. He tells her about the sleeping issues and she shrugs it off, saying something about how sometimes side effects last longer and his body is just adjusting, and she’s right, he knows she is. Two weeks on a higher dose is hardly any time at all, but he has deadlines and team training and enhanced maniacs trying to punch their way through Manhattan and he can’t do it all on his sleep schedule from college.

The smaller dose once in a while helps, and while his mood drops for a day or two, it’s still fine and he gets a little more rest. Steve looks a little less worried every time they see each other, and Bruce points out the extended benefits of yoga every time he joins his evening practice. Tony still dozes off during movie night and spends the occasional eight hour stretch in the lab, but he feels healthier. He feels like something is working.

After another two weeks, it doesn’t help anymore.

So he skips a day.

And another.

He doesn’t plan to make a habit of it, but he’s dead on his feet and Fury wants them to track down a group over in Europe. It’s the first mission since they took him off the bench and Tony really wants to be able to see straight when they find them. And it sort of works, because on the second day without taking his pill, he’s able to drift off into a fitful sleep for almost six hours. He feels as well-rested as he can, and the mission is a piece of cake. It’s only on the ride back that he realizes his brain feels heavy, and that he’s tuning out everything Cap says and ignoring his own mental stream as well. He wants nothing more than to lay down and never do a single thing again.

He takes his medicine as soon as they land.

His renewed interest in medication management doesn’t last long, when he realizes that if he’s already skipping doses, he should be okay to take some sort of sleeping medication. He’s two days off when he has JARVIS run a blood test to see how much is still in his system, and the AI concludes that it would be safe to take an over-the-counter strength sleep medicine. He starts out with barely anything, a half dose of what’s basically NyQuil without the cough stuff, and nearly cries in relief when he feels drowsy. He sleeps for ten hours straight that night.

It becomes routine: two nights of medicine followed by two skipped days. This way, he reasons, he’s still getting the positive benefit of the anti-depressants, but making up for the accumulated sleep debt over those days. He wakes up groggy but somewhat rested, and even though he can feel himself descending somewhat into the fog that characterized the past few months, at least he’s sleeping semi-regularly. That’s good for his health, right?

-

He doesn’t take anything for five days straight, and JARVIS puts in an order for a daily pill sorter entirely on his own.

After another two weeks, the sleeping medicine doesn’t do much. He still feels the drowsiness, but without his meds, he doesn’t have the motivation to go to bed anymore. His eyes are heavy. The team hears him say that he’s tired at the dinner table, at movie night, in his lab, on missions, in training, but they don’t see him sleep. Pepper makes a point of asking JARVIS if he’s taking his meds every day, so there’s no getting out of it anymore without straight up lying to her. So he takes them, and stares at the ceiling for hours every night until his body pities him enough to get some rest. His physical energy levels are through the roof all the time, and he wonders if this is the payoff for fixing his brain; one thing always has to be off. Close a door, and a window opens. When he shuffles into the elevator after hours of sleeplessness, he barely notices that JARVIS has every button blocked but the common floor.

Steve’s warming milk on the stove at four in the morning when Tony stumbles into the kitchen. Tony manages a small wave from within his blanket, settling down on a stool and resting his head on the counter.

“Rough night?” Steve passes him an empty mug.

The countertop is cool against his cheek and when he closes his eyes, it feels like he’s spinning. “You could say that.” He hears Steve sigh. Pushing his head up takes effort, but he props his chin up in his hands. “You’re here too, so,” he says. “Can’t judge me too much.” Steve’s wearing sweats and a thick sweater, which means he’s not up for a morning run. Even in his state, Tony can tell that the man is a little off-center. His hair is messy, eyes still full of sleep, like something woke him unexpectedly. 

Steve smiles, a little sad. “Yeah, well.” There’s tension behind his eyes, but Tony doesn’t ask. Steve pours hot chocolate mix into the milk, stirring with a spoon, and pours it between two mugs, pushing one toward Tony. “Cheers.” Tony sips it appreciatively, focusing on the warm cup between his hands. “How have you been?”

He isn’t really in the mood for talking, but maybe it will help. “Investors have been on my ass about everything lately. We’re trying to launch a new line in a few weeks, so there’s not a single moment of peace.” He’s not really lying, he does have a few projects due. The problem isn’t the investors, though, it’s the way he stares at the holograms and never gets anywhere. He can fake productivity when Bruce is there, maybe get a few new lines of code in, but he knows there won’t be any substantial changes until it comes down to the deadline.

Behind them, the lights of the city sprinkle out below like stars in the sky. Steve hums in response, drinking his own cocoa, and they sit in silence for a few seconds. The warmth of the drink makes him feel heavy.

“How’s, you know.” Steve looks uncomfortable, and Tony tries to focus on his face instead of letting his eyes close. “How are you feeling?” His hands leave his mug and start moving dirty dishes from dinner into the sink almost on their own, and Tony’s entire body wants to melt through the floor because he knows where this is going.

Tony finishes his hot chocolate in a gulp. “I’m fine, Steve.” Coming to the common floor was supposed to be a way to escape those conversations, leave the constant anxiety that surrounded him when he was trying to fall asleep and feel comfortable in the place that reminded him of all the good in his life.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.” He wraps the blanket around himself more tightly.

“Tony, tell me the truth.”

Something about the forcefulness of his voice and the interrogation mixes poorly with his already sleep-deprived temperament, which would have been just fine with warm drinks and no conversation. “I’m fine, Steve, and I wouldn’t have accepted the hot chocolate if I knew it was just a bribe to get me to talk.” He leaves his mug on the counter and pushes his stool back in preparation to leave. His heart is beating too fast again, and he tightens his grip on the blanket around his shoulders.

“It’s my responsibility to know how my teammates are doing.” Tony can see the second Steve realizes that was the wrong choice of words, even as he digs himself further into the hole. “I mean, we all have to be in fighting shape to keep up the team, and I don’t want anything slipping under the radar-“

“Yeah, wouldn’t want anything slipping under the radar anymore, would we,” Tony huffs. “Our team functioned just fine before-“

“Before what, Tony?” Steve says, and all the warmth the hot chocolate gave him slips away. “Are you actually going to admit it, or are you going to keep skirting around the issue and pretend like everything is handled as usual?”

And Tony is on his way out of the kitchen and he stops, anger and hurt bubbling up from some untapped reserve. “I am dealing with everything just fine, thank you very much,” he says, even as he sways with the effort of standing up. “Just because I almost took a nasty spill doesn’t mean you need to be hovering over me like a mother hen.”

“Nasty spill?” Tony can hear the outrage radiating from Steve’s body even with his back to him, and realizes what he said. “You tried to jump off the roof.”

He doesn’t turn around. The blanket is soft in his hands, the floor is hard and cold beneath his feet. The room smells of chocolate and milk, and he can hear the soft sound of bubbles popping in the sink water. He’s pretty sure he feels his heart stop and his chest constrict, and his fingers fumble for the arc reactor that’s been gone for almost a year. “I slipped.”

“Are you really going to stand there and tell me it was an accident?” Steve says. “That you didn’t mean to fall?”

And Tony can’t really answer that, because he knew the calculations. He knew that one step was all it took. He was prepared. Everything had been so unpredictable; the nightmares, the missions, the guilt that rushed from every direction to overwhelm his senses and he just wanted it all to be quiet. One last decision that wasn’t left up to chance. A few last moments of peace.

He stands there, frozen, until he hears Steve sigh. “Go to sleep, Tony. We can talk in the morning when we’re both feeling better.”

And that was what had started this whole thing, with them both unwillingly awake with a friendship that broke down to fighting so easily. He shuffles back into the elevator, feeling deflated, and hopes that this attempt at sleep will be more successful than the last.

Tony avoids Steve for six days, relying on JARVIS to tell him where the other man is so they don’t bump into each other. He has no desire to rehash the conversation, and definitely not in front of an audience. He sleeps some nights, but the hopefulness of those first weeks has dissipated. He knows it’s not good, that he should go back and tell someone about it, but every day feels the same. He sits in the lab, in his room, on the couch, but nothing feels comfortable. His body feels twisted in some sick way, unable to relax in any situation but never able to muster enough energy to do anything worthwhile. He makes it into the gym on a good morning, but only gets one foot on the treadmill for a warmup before the motivation leaves him. Showering used to be a sort of reset button, but lately all it does is give him an excuse to lay on his bed for another hour before trying to sleep. The medicine is working, he thinks, because he does have more energy and his brain doesn’t feel like mush all the time, but getting under four hours of sleep every other night is almost completely destroying those benefits.

JARVIS sounds the Avengers alarm and Tony groans, pushes himself off the couch in the lab, and puts the suit on, carrying the helmet with him as he goes to meet the others.

Steve takes one look at him and shakes his head. “No. Absolutely not.” Even Nat winces when she sees him, and he turns to look at his reflection in one of the windows. He hasn’t shaved in a few days, and his hair is plastered to his head in ways he didn’t know were possible. If anything, he looks drunk. He looks at Steve and opens his mouth to make his case, but Steve’s expression is thin and severe, and maybe the week-long avoidance didn’t work the way he wanted it to.

He finds he doesn’t have the energy to argue. “Fine, but I’m staying on comms.” They can’t stop him from doing that, anyway.

In the end, it turns out to be a largely uneventful mission. There are a few maneuvers that they could have used him for, but most of it could have been handled by a regular SHIELD team, or anyone with an iota of combat training. Clint does get a nasty scrape across his back, so Tony takes it upon himself to gather the medical supplies before they return, because it’s a Saturday night and most of the regular medical team is already gone. He finds the bandages and is searching around for some sort of pain medicine when he comes face to face with a bottle of what are clearly medical strength sleeping pills.

He can hear loud protests from the hallway, and he shoves them in his pocket just as the team pushes Clint in on a wheelchair. Nat takes the bandages from him and a bottle of ibuprofen from the cabinet, and he waves to them as he takes the elevator back up to his floor.

He reads the bottle. Looks up the chemical formula. Has JARVIS triple check the ingredients and chemical structure and his blood chemistry and makes sure that he’s not going to mess something up, because no matter what Steve may suspect, he doesn’t really want to die at the moment. He didn’t take his medication that morning, so he pops one pill in his mouth and waits.

Maybe it’s how tired he is, or some sort of placebo effect, or maybe the pills are just more intense than the stuff he’d been using, but he feels a wave of sleep come over him only twenty minutes later, and he doesn’t try to fight it.

He wakes up feeling rested but not refreshed, so he actually takes his full-strength medicine for the first time in a week, showers, shaves, and walks down to the kitchen to grab a bagel. Nat and Bruce are there, talking over scrambled eggs, and he joins the conversation for a minute while he’s waiting on the toaster. On his way out, he runs into Steve, who tries to apologize for the night before while Tony brushes past him. Once he’s in the lab, he shoots him a quick text.

_Don’t worry about it, I would have made the same call. Everything’s fine now._

It’s a little bit evasive, but he’s always a little bit evasive, and hopefully the partial admission that something had been wrong would calm Steve down enough that he wouldn’t push the issue anymore. He’s halfway done with his bagel when Steve gives his message a thumbs up. Good.

-

SI piles on the work and he stops taking his meds again. There’s barely enough time as it is, but he knows from trial and error that he really needs to get restful sleep if he’s going to make anything of substance for the new product line. He can’t deal with lying awake in bed for hours, so he spends most of the day in his lab and the other small part completely passed out. Even without the extra burst of energy from his meds, the threat of Pepper and a pissed off board is a hell of a drug. He gets food delivered through the private elevator a few times, and moves directly from the workshop to his suite for rest, so he’s pretty sure the rest of the Avengers haven’t seen him in about two weeks before Bruce knocks on the thick glass door.

“Tony!” He waves through the glass, and Tony spins around in his chair and waves him in. “How are you, we haven’t seen you in a while?”

“Sorry, Brucie-bear, I’ve had deadlines.” And thank god for that, because he knows that without the board breathing down his neck for new products, he never would have gotten anything accomplished. Last minute work was always his best work before, usually because he didn’t have any motivation to do anything ahead of time. His brain just didn’t click on before the 48-hour mark. 

Bruce sits down at his own workstation a few feet away (it was always nice to bounce ideas off of each other in the same room, rather than between two labs). He gestures to the several holograms surrounding Tony. “New gadgets?”

Tony blinks for a second, then squints at the holograms. “Portable heater.” He spins the diagram around and pushes it through the air toward his friend. “I could build one in my sleep, but it has to be energy efficient, and heat small spaces quickly, and be easily rechargeable without an electrical power source. And cheap.” He runs his hands through his hair, and Bruce looks at him with concern.

“You look tired.” It’s not a question, doesn’t really require an answer, but Tony’s been around Bruce enough to know it’s not just an offhand comment.

“Yeah, I’ve been pretty busy down here, but by the end of the week the rush should be over, and I’ll be back to having some actual down time again.” He knows his eyes are bloodshot and the holograms surrounding them shimmer in a way that makes him pretty sure he should have gone to sleep earlier, but he only has a few more hours to go before he’s done. Bruce nods, passes the hologram back over to him, and sits at his desk for a little while, working on some project of his own. After a few minutes, Tony’s able to tune out the periodic glances Bruce sends his way, and he doesn’t notice when he leaves after a few hours.

Two days later, his projects are in, his deadlines met, and everything is passed off to the research and development team in time for the product launch. Tony falls into bed exhausted and relieved.

He wakes up feeling like shit, and it takes him almost three minutes to realize that he’s been so preoccupied with his company responsibilities that he hasn’t taken his prescription in almost a month. If he looks back, he’s been feeling like this for a while, but work took priority. His work always takes priority. It’s almost noon, so it’s too late now if he wants to have any hope of sleeping tonight, so he puts the bottle of sleeping pills on his nightstand and vows that tonight will be the last time, and then he’ll actually take what he’s supposed to and talk to his doctor about fixing him again. Get back on the right track.

JARVIS reminds him that he has team training at one, so he slowly grabs the first pair of sweats and a t-shirt he can find and makes his way down to the kitchen for something that isn’t or Chinese takeout. He isn’t sure when he ate last. He feels slightly disoriented in the team space, but he chalks it up to the past few weeks. Maybe he’s used to the bright lighting in the lab, but everything seems dimmer, fuzzier than normal. Like the earth’s gravitational pull kicked it up a notch but didn’t affect anyone but him.

They train as a team and even though he’s completely covered in the armor, his reactions are too slow, and Natasha gets a kick underneath him and knocks him flat on his back, even as he tries to stabilize himself. She gives him a half smile and helps him back up, and things are going well until Steve decides they should train without equipment, putting him at an immediate disadvantage. Sure, he’s better than the average fighter, but even he can’t hold his own against a super soldier or two fully trained spies. Nat teaches him some new stances and a few escape moves for if he’s ever out of the suit, and by the time they’re done, Clint and Steve are telling them that Bruce has dinner ready.

They all sit at the table, still sweaty from the workout, and pass around bowls of rice and chicken and vegetables. Tony isn’t all that hungry, but he picks as his food and tries to carry a conversation with his friends. Bruce is describing some group he saw in a café this morning, and their smiles and laughter come so easy that Tony doesn’t even realize he’s checked out until someone directs a question at him and he doesn’t answer.

“Tony, did you hear me? What’s the worst kind of pie you’ve had?” They’re all looking at him, and he laughs, a little forced but also genuine.

“Rhodey and I would always hit up different restaurants every month back in college, had a bit of a ranking system.” They would take his car and drive out to a different place and order a bunch of different things on the menu, just to see if it was worth coming back. “This one place had a cherry pie that looked so good, but when we ate it, it tasted like there was almost no sugar. Rhodey almost threw up.” His smile is real, the memory is bright and shining in his mind, but he feels like he’s watching his friends through fogged glass. Everything is a bit muffled, from their laughter and the kitchen lights to the feeling of the table under his hands.

Clint says something about never eating cherry pie again.

“My least favorite is key lime, if that’s what you want to know.” He shudders, half from his memory of the taste and half because he’s so desperately trying to project normalcy. “Tastes a lot worse coming back up.” There’s a mixture of laughter and noises of disgust, but the conversation carries on. He tries to keep chiming in, but his consciousness shifts about two inches backwards, and gravity keeps pulling his hand down as he tries to bring rice to his mouth. The chicken is cold. His hands feel wrong. None of this is new, but it startles him just the same, feeling exactly like he felt before.

He helps Bruce with the dishes in a daze, responding to questions with one-word answers until the other man gives up, looking at him with every dish they passed. When they’re done, Bruce swings his hand onto Tony’s shoulder and steers him toward the couches, announcing a movie night. They all settle in, and he curls up on the side of the couch, accepts the blanket he’s handed. He knows what Bruce is trying to do and he hopes it helps because his body is on autopilot with his brain sluggishly chugging behind.

He never talked to Bruce about that night. He’s sure Steve said something to the rest of them, but he doesn’t know how much detail was discussed. (He knows that the Hulk room was in use for three hours, but they’ve never actually addressed it). There was some sort of understanding there, the silent reassurance of knowing someone else understood your experiences without ever speaking a word. Natasha didn’t act any different, unless he counted the times he saw her watch him a little more carefully on missions. Clint gave him longer side glances when he said something that bordered on self-deprecation or indicated that he was working himself into the ground. Steve looked like he was trying to act as a team therapist without any training. Bruce just stayed the same. It was nice.

The movie ends and even though he’s been staring at the screen the entire time, he can’t remember what they were even watching. Someone starts talking, probably about the movie, but he is warm under the blanket and his face is pressed up against the arm of the couch in a way that’s kind of comfortable, so he watches the conversation behind fuzzy eyes. Bruce’s laughter is close nearby, and it meshes with the other voices to create a pleasant tone as his eyes grow heavy.

He wakes up to the sound of the Avengers alarm blaring, and the rush of adrenaline makes him fall off the couch, tangled in the blanket. He makes it to the workshop, into his undersuit and armor with the helmet on, and all the way into the Quinjet before he registers how awful he feels. It’s nothing he hasn’t felt before, but he’s kicking himself anyway. It’s his fault he’s off the meds, and it’s his fault that he’s chronically sleep-deprived and so physically depressed he can barely see straight.

Steve gives them a quick overview of what they’re facing and what the plan is. He catches most of it, and JARVIS throws the rest up on the screen so he’s able to remember what’s going on for longer than the next fifteen seconds. They fly out to a rural town in southern Pennsylvania and get a good look at some sort of mutated animal breathing fire at buildings.

He does his job. They’re pretty much just trying to kill all of the creatures and evacuate civilians, which is low on the Avengers-level threat scale, but it wears on him just the same. The suit isn’t affected by their fire, and he works on autopilot, throwing repulsor blasts in different directions until there aren’t any left. He meets the others back at the Quinjet, taking in Natasha’s soot-covered face and the way that Clint’s sleeve is charred. Even Steve looks worse for wear. It almost feels like a sick joke when the armor retracts and he steps out, sweaty but unharmed. They fly back in silence. Nat’s holding an oxygen mask over her face because you never can be too careful, and Clint’s changed shirts. Bruce and Steve are sitting in the pilot seats, and he knows Steve is filling out a mission report like he does immediately after every little skirmish.

They’re back to the tower before he realizes it, and Bruce actually has to wave a hand in front of his face to bring him out of his daze when they land. All he wants to do is take a hot shower and rest for a bit. The armor falls off him once he’s in the workshop, and he decides to shower there. There isn’t enough energy to make it back to the elevator.

Sitting down in the shower is nice, he decides. The water is warm, and he’s able to rest his head on the wall and close his eyes. He slaps soap around his body, unable to bother with his hair, and sits for a few minutes. After a while, he decides this whole thing is pathetic, and if he has the luck to get out of a battle unharmed, he might as well make himself useful for the rest of the team. He towels off, throws on some new clothes, and goes upstairs to make lunch. There’s leftovers from the night before in the fridge, but he opens the pantry instead.

Someone says something behind him. He turns around and they’re all there looking at him. Clint’s arm is bandaged but the rest of them look clean, and Bruce says something again, and he realizes that his hearing has been fuzzy for a while. All of his senses, actually, which is probably something he should come back to, but he asks them if they want anything for lunch and Bruce does something with his face before saying yes.

He ends up making grilled cheeses. The team looks like they could use comfort food right now, and he stirs a huge pot of soup on the stove and flips sandwiches and watches as the others talk amongst themselves at the counter. He doesn’t like cooking as much as Bruce, but he’s not bad. He just doesn’t do it often. The sandwiches are distributed, and it seems like everyone’s satisfied, so he makes sure the stove is off and grabs a granola bar for himself.

“Tony?” He turns, feet away from the elevator, and sees Nat and the rest of them looking in his direction. “You should stay and eat with us.”

He knows that if he was fine, he would say okay. Go back, sit down, and laugh about one thing or another the way they did in the earlier days, when he could attend meetings and galas and still make team activities without feeling exhausted. But the buzzing in his brain is so loud and his hands feel so weak and his voice so far away when he says that he has a project to work on. He doesn’t look at them as he leaves.

The elevator takes him up down to the workshop, even though he doesn’t actually have any work. There’s a car in the corner that he was tinkering with a few months ago and stopped when everything started going up in flames. He liked tinkering before, right?

He finds his toolbox. Rolls under the car, fiddles around with a few things, and rolls back out. The tools feel wrong in his hands. He flips them around a few times, trying to get the feel back, because he knows that this is supposed to feel good. He’s done this before, he remembers the times where he’d come down and mess around with different machines just for the hell of it, play fetch with the bots and throw around friendly banter with Pepper or Rhodey or whoever ended up being there at the time. The memories play themselves out in his mind, and he can remember how okay everything was. They were protecting Earth from aliens and he was dying and then he was stranded in the middle of nowhere and dealing with having to protect the Earth from aliens, but the problem had always been that he felt like an exposed nerve, feeling too much all the time.

Now he feels like someone carved him away from those emotions and trapped him behind a piece of glass that no one else can see.

Dummy rolls towards him and offers a tennis ball, and he realizes he’s sitting with his back against the wall. He doesn’t think it’ll help, but he takes the ball, and throws it across the room. Dummy races after it just like always, but the sight doesn’t even prompt a smile. His face feels heavy. His fingers feel swollen. The ball is back in his hands, and he tosses it in a different direction. His hands are shaking.

Remembering hurts. The muscle memory of easy smiles and laughter is gone even though he can remember when it came naturally. He can remember when he didn’t spend ten minutes in the bathroom looking at himself in the mirror, trying to figure out what was off in his eyes so that people didn’t ask him if he was alright. When he didn’t move from the bed to the couch to the workshop bench to the kitchen stools because nowhere felt right. When he didn’t wake up every morning with every nerve in his body numb. Before he heard static behind every thought, every movement.

What pisses him off is that he wasn’t doing anything differently. He used to skip meals and drink until he was wasted and spend nights awake because everything was so interesting and he had to figure it out right at that moment. Even before Iron Man, when he leaned into his reputation and went to clubs and snorted powders off of dirty tables and threw new weapons at SI so Obadiah wouldn’t say anything about his other habits. And sure, his coping mechanisms may have been a little fucked up back then, but for the most part, it was fun. He was running his body into the ground, but it was fun and it was exhilarating and he could experience anything he wanted. And now he’s living with his friends and running a successful company that genuinely helps the world and sometimes eating three meals a day and working out and connecting with people and he doesn’t feel a single thing.

He’s been sitting on the floor for too long. The tennis ball is next to his hand, but Dummy isn’t anywhere in his line of sight.

The elevator door opens into his suite, but he doesn’t remember how he got there. The lights are dimmed, the windows dark, and his bathroom light is on. He brushes his teeth sitting down, one hand steady on the sink. Puts his toothbrush down, rinses. Splashes some water on his face. Turns the light off.

The pills are still on his nightstand and he takes one. Lays down. Stretches his hands out and waits for sleep and remembers when the empty space next to him used to be occupied. The smiles and the comfort before she couldn’t take it anymore. It wasn’t her fault. He closes his eyes and sees Bruce jumping into the car next to him, going back to his lab and setting up a new workstation for his newest friend. How the man looks so disappointed when he stays up for days, but eventually gives in to excitement. How he’s only been disappointed recently. And Steve makes his blood boil and backs him up in fights and makes really good hot chocolate and has been angry at him a lot lately. They used to play chess together, two different strategists trying to see who would win. But that was before. And Nat and Clint and occasionally Thor, they see him pulling away and he sees himself and screams to stop before he cuts anyone else out, because he finally has a family and feels safe, but he can’t stop. He cuts the strings that tie them together, one by one. There’s no future that involves him.

He tries going over the mission, his projects, new weapons. None of them hold his attention. His mind keeps pulling up good memories and the way he ruined them. He’s Iron Man. He saved New York and countless other cities and every single person he’s closest to knows he tried to walk off a roof. He tracks down threats and bad politicians and old Nazi groups and feels good and the next week they are back. Again and again and again and there is no future where he gets to put down the suit and be done. He could see it before, the shining idea of a new world of peace, but now it crumbles to dust every time he tries to think of it again.

JARVIS’s voice makes him open his eyes and he realizes that it’s been almost thirty minutes and his thoughts are interspersed with static and he needs out. Everything about him feels heavy and he can’t even imagine what tomorrow will be like if tonight is the same as every other night. The open bottle is still on his nightstand, so he grabs it and shakes another pill into his hand and swallows it dry. Slides back into bed, under the blankets. Waits for sleep to come.

And waits.

And he doesn’t know what it is about tonight that he just can’t deal with this fucking messed up routine he’s created of sleep and energy and pulling away, but he knows that he just wants to spend a few hours away from the constant awareness of the way the wind is blowing across the side of the building and the faint hum of the heating and how he can practically see the night traffic outside even though his windows are completely blacked out. There’s a whirlwind of anger and regret and disappointment cracking the fogged glass around him and he can’t deal with it. He’s trapped, he knows, but the numbness is comforting and quiet and comfortable. JARVIS says something, but he mutes him as his breathing hitches and he finds himself sitting on the ground, back against the bed, struggling to breathe against the tears that threaten to spill down his face. The cracks grow wider.

It’s pathetic.

He stands up too suddenly, off-balance, and his hand grabs the nightstand and knocks off the stupid bottle of sleeping pills that apparently don’t fucking work anyway, and a handful of them roll out and he grabs them in anger, knocks them back without water. Throwing the bottle across the room doesn’t do much to help his breathing or the frustration, but he falls back onto the bed anyway, trying to hold in what promises to be a monumental breakdown if he doesn’t get it under control right fucking now.

The sheets are new and soft and cold, and the temperature beneath his skin is calming. His brain is still buzzing, so loud that he can’t hold any new thoughts, but he tries to center himself with the texture of his blanket and the feeling of the pillow under his head. He stays there for a few minutes, trying to regain a normal breathing pattern. JARVIS must have lifted the window shades, because the sounds of car horns and overhead planes and a light drizzle enter his awareness, and the room seems much brighter than before even though the sun set hours ago.

His breaths start coming easier, slower, and he doesn’t know how long he’s been sitting there, holding onto the sheets and the blankets, but something new feels off. He sits up, groaning as his head spins and a wave of drowsiness hits him like a wave, and throws the blankets back, checking himself for some sign of a problem.

He’s running his fingertips over his chest when it hits him. His hands are shaking. His fingers feel disconnected from his body and the familiar texture of his scars feels muffled.

The pills.

The bathroom light is on again and he stumbles over in his haste, kneeling over the toilet and jamming two fingers toward the back of his throat. He gags, throws up mostly water, and tears come to his eyes. Tries two, three more times, and nothing. All of his panic from before comes back, hits him in the stomach, and he doubles over at the first stab of pain.

He can’t tell if it’s the panic or the pills that are making his head foggy, but he makes it to his feet and into the elevator, jams the button for the common floor, and leans against the railing. The door opens into the kitchen, and he sees Steve at the stove, making hot chocolate in the same way he had before. The light is warm and inviting, and he stumbles out of the elevator toward it, trying to keep his eyes open and focus on walking in a straight line at the same time. He feels like he’s drifting.

Steve looks up at him and smiles, and he realizes they haven’t really talked since his half-assed text message. As he gets closer to the stove, Steve’s face falters, and he reaches out, steadying him as he comes closer. “Tony?” His voice fades into static and the lights are blinding white and everything is too warm and he can barely feel Steve’s hand on his arm.

And Tony shakes his head, and feels his legs start to buckle beneath him. “I fucked up, Steve.” His head spins again, exactly like when he was tired, but this time the edges of his vision are fading and he sees Steve’s eyes widen as he catches him. “I didn’t mean to.”

The last thing he hears is Steve calling for help.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: suicidal thoughts, mention of past attempt, overdose


	2. quiescent (adj.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- in a state of inactivity or dormancy; at rest
> 
> trigger warnings in end notes

Tony collapses onto him and for a second he can’t breathe. Tony’s eyes are closed and the grip he has on his arm goes completely slack. Steve catches him like it’s second nature, pushes back the cold and the train and the iceberg that brought him to the kitchen in the first place, and screams for help. Tony’s feet dangle as Steve blindly makes his way towards medical, and when he gets there, he sees Natasha running to open the doors.

It’s all a blur after that. He sits and watches doctors go in and out of the room where Tony’s lying unconscious on a hospital bed. Bruce doesn’t go inside, and it’s surely a testament to how bad it must be, because last time, he left. He saw Steve come down from the roof holding Tony’s wrist, saw Steve’s shock and Tony’s numbness, and somehow knew exactly what happened. But Tony was okay that time. He was alive and walking and telling Steve to fuck off at every chance he got only hours later, but now he’s spread out on a bed, surrounded by doctors and machines, and doesn’t look like he’ll wake up. Maybe that’s what Bruce suspects.

That night months before, he opened the door to the roof and stepped out, breathing in the air and the expanse of the sky, as close he could get to recreating trips with the Howling Commandos in the middle of a vast, bright city. The stars were visible, with only light pollution obscuring the weakest ones, and Steve had been looking forward to the calm peace they brought him. So when he stepped outside, he wasn’t expecting Tony to be standing a foot away from the ledge, his back to him and hands in pockets, looking up at the sky. Steve called his name, but he didn’t react. He put down his blanket and took careful steps toward the other man, trying not to startle him.

He watched as Tony sighed towards the sky and brought his gaze down to the city streets.

Steve moved as fast as possible, but as he crossed the gap between them, Tony took a step. His right foot hovered over open air for a split second. Steve managed to get his hand around his arm and pulled him back before he had the chance to topple to the pavement fifty floors below. Tony didn’t even react. Steve hadn’t been able to see his face before, but now it was completely expressionless, with only a short tear track down one cheek to indicate anything was wrong.

As he dragged Tony back inside, unsure of what to do, they ran into Bruce. Steve looked at him, shifting his eyes toward Tony and back, and Bruce must have seen his windswept hair and pale face and the way the Tony was completely unresponsive apart from blinking every few seconds. His expression changed from confusion to horror almost immediately. “Take him to his room and talk to JARVIS.” Steve watched him choke out the words as his skin changed. They went opposite ways, Steve to the elevator and Bruce to the panic room.

He laid Tony down on his bed, avoiding the way his eyes stayed vacant as he placed a pillow under his head and covered him with a soft blanket.

Tony had just tried to kill himself.

He would have succeeded.

He asked JARVIS a question, but the AI didn’t respond. He tried again, with the same result. It was confusing, and Steve blinked a few times before Tony rolled onto his stomach and buried his face into the pillow, and then it clicked. Tony shut down JARVIS. He was willing to bet that if he went down to the workshop, his bots would be turned off as well.

Tony planned to kill himself. Not an accident, not one bad night. A plan.

That specific horror of the memory pulls him back to the present, because what had tonight been? He thought Tony was doing better. He knew that he’d been in the workshop for SI a lot lately, but he was talking at dinner and had been capable as an Avenger on the last mission. He seemed to be working his way back up. Even the mission today had been fine, and at the table he made grilled cheese and left in the way he always did when he wanted to sit in the workshop. He even said he had a project to work on.

Maybe he wasn’t as good at reading the man as he thought.

Natasha presses a sandwich into his hands, and he looks up. “Overdose,” she says, and he is grateful all at once that she trusts him enough to show her real emotions, because his pain is mirrored in her eyes. “Sleeping pills. We found it in his room.” She passes him an empty prescription bottle, and he reads the label.

He doesn’t know the medical terminology that well, but when he reads the name on the bottle he has to stop himself from crushing the plastic tube. “But these are for –“

“Clint,” she agrees. “Based on what the doctors have found, he’s been using them for a while before tonight. He must have found them in here and taken them without anyone noticing.” Steve turns that over in his mind for a few seconds. Nat takes a seat in the chair next to him and presses her shoulder against his. “Do you think he planned this one, too?”

Her words are ice water across his back as he thinks back to the scene in the kitchen barely over an hour ago. Tony looked right at him with unfocused eyes and pale skin and said, “I didn’t mean to.” He came looking for someone. He was scared, not resigned. Not like the first time.

“No,” Steve says. “I think it was a mistake.”

“Steve, he took almost five times more than the maximum dose.”

“I know.” Tony tried to kill himself again, and Steve feels like he’s just there to watch. The morning after he caught him on the roof, Tony emerged in a suit, tie, and darkened sunglasses. He grinned at them and walked out the door and pretended like nothing happened, even when Steve tried to talk to him about it. A week later, JARVIS said he was under appropriate care, and wouldn’t offer any more information.

Steve tried. He kept him benched until he seemed to be doing better. He kept him off the mission when they hadn’t spoken for a week and he knew he was massively unprepared to fight the EMPs that SHIELD intel had spotted. Every time he tried to bring up his health, Tony waved him off, or worse, kicked him out. He simply wanted to never address it again, go on pretending nothing happened, and let Steve watch him tumble back down the mountain he thought he already conquered.

“It’s looking better.” Bruce joins them, looking around for an extra chair before deciding to sit on the floor between him and Natasha. “Heart rate’s low but stable, they got enough out that it’s not going to be deadly, but he’ll be asleep for a while. He hasn’t been eating much, so they’re keeping him under until they can stabilize that a bit more.” He exhales deeply in a clear attempt to calm himself. “JARVIS was still on this time.”

Steve places a comforting hand on his shoulder. “Thank you, Bruce.” They sit in silence, but Steve can hear the steady sound of the heart monitor through the door where Tony lies. It was an accident, he tells himself, and tries to push away the voice that tells him that anyone who makes this kind of accident isn’t doing well.

They wait five days. The hallway turns into some sort of rotational shift, with two chairs always holding various combinations of Avengers and at times, Pepper and Happy. Bruce is the only one officially allowed in the room, but he lets them in to sit for an hour or so. Steve watches as each of his teammates walk out. Natasha is stone-faced, but as they lock eyes in the hallway she shows the same vulnerability as before. Clint leaves the building altogether after his first time, and returns hours later with all of their favorite snacks. No one touches the chocolate-covered espresso beans that he leaves on the table. Happy escorts Pepper out of the room with an arm around her shoulder as she straightens her shoulders and composes herself before heading back to the SI levels of the tower. Bruce has the same face every time; he’s calm and composed and always the face of reason, checking vitals and making sure the room is clean while the other person sits next to the bed.

Steve doesn’t know how he’ll react until he’s standing in the doorway. Bruce told him that Tony was looking better, that they’d wake him up soon, but Tony is pale and small in the fluorescent lighting. For a second, Steve is back on the New York streets, watching as Thor wrenches the faceplate off the armor and reveals Tony’s face, with closed eyes and a peaceful expression that would have been reassuring except for the darkness where the arc reactor lay. Beneath the hospital sheets, there is no glow, and Steve tells himself several times that it was removed, and that Tony’s life doesn’t depend on it anymore. It doesn’t calm his nerves. Bruce flits around the room, straightening the sheets and organizing the bedside table as if anything had been touched since the last time he arranged it.

By some miracle, the media doesn’t notice. Tony doesn’t leave the tower frequently anyway, and hasn’t for a while, so a week without anyone catching a glimpse of him doesn’t even garner a headline. There are only a few comments about his absence following the massive Stark Industries product line announcement. Normally Tony would have been all over, promoting portable energy generators and related products, including their large donation to several homeless shelters across the state. Instead, Steve watches Pepper give just one speech about the new products, taking questions at the end.

Out of all the press conferences Steve has been to, it’s pretty tame. The reporters are respectful, and photographers snap posed photos that will be on websites and press releases within hours. Pepper clearly knows what she’s talking about, and questions begin to die down as she gives them more information to use in their articles. He’s impressed by her professionalism as she calls on another hand in the crowd. A smartly dressed man stands up, and he recognizes his press pass as one of the major national newspapers. “Usually Mr. Stark promotes company products. Where is he tonight?” The reporter looks genuinely curious, and others around him nod.

Steve is very familiar with the mask Tony wears for the press, the way he smiles and narrows his eyebrows and answers questions with snark and charm and an overwhelming amount of personality, but Pepper’s is different. Her face is carefully composed, almost neutral with a controlled smile that seems to convey just enough care and exasperation to not fuel any rumors about them rekindling their relationship. “Tony has worked very hard on this line, and is taking a break from promotional work at the moment. We’ll let you know when you’ll be seeing more of him.” She smiles, and doesn’t look at Steve sitting at the side of the stage. “That will be all the questions for today.” The reporters start to shut down their equipment and chatter amongst themselves, and Pepper walks away from the podium, her expression not swaying in the slightest.

If he didn’t know better, Steve would have been completely convinced.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tw: observed suicide attempt


	3. aurora (n.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- dawn

He feels the pinch in his arm first. A pressure around one of his fingernails. A heart monitor in the vicinity, beeping in a rhythmic pattern. His eyes are so heavy he can’t open them, but something warm is brushing against his right arm and it feels familiar. Safe.

The next time he wakes, he’s able to open his eyes. The IV is still connected to his arm, but the pulse oximeter is gone. He looks for the heart monitor but stops when he sees Bruce asleep to his right. His glasses are on a small table and his left arm is on the bed, propping up his head. He tries to push his body up to a sitting position against his pillows, only somewhat succeeding in the endeavor and waking Bruce up in the process. His friend stares at him, looking slightly surprised, and reaches for his glasses. He waits for him to speak, but all he does is glance over a StarkPad that’s surely giving him readouts of every vital sign in his body. He seems satisfied with the results and looks back at him. “It’s been almost a week, Tony.”

He tries to talk and nothing comes out, just a slight rasp from his throat, and Bruce hands him a small plastic cup of water. He sips it, clears his throat, and remembers why he’s lying in a bed with an IV and his friend supervising for what seems to be hours at a time. His eyes close almost automatically, and he presses the back of his head against the pillows as if it’ll remove him from what promises to be an intense set of questions that he doesn’t want to deal with.

Bruce laying his hand on his arm should be comforting, but it sends uncomfortable shivers through his body, and Bruce removes it and sighs quietly. “They took you off the feeding tube when they decided to wake you up today. I’m going to get you some real food, and I’ll be back in about fifteen minutes. We can talk after you’re a little more adjusted.”

The second the door closes behind Bruce, he pushes himself further up the bed. “JARVIS,” he says, faltering slightly when he realizes that he saw everything unfold.

“It is good to see you awake and well, sir. We have been quite worried.”

“I’m sorry, buddy.” The AI’s tone calms him a bit, but the reminder of the bots startles him. He holds the handrail on the bed like it will protect him from bad news and hopes for the best. “How are the kids?”

“They have been eagerly awaiting your return. Agent Barton has taken to playing fetch with them during the day.”

Shame works its way into his heart like a knife. He left his bots alone and made an almost permanent decision. He had more sense before. He can remember every second of the planning and preparing before but this time he can’t recall more than flashes of the night a few days ago. “JARVIS,” he says, hoping no one with super hearing was directly outside the door. “Do you have footage?”

“Sir, I do not believe this to be a wise-“

He picks up the StarkPad the Bruce left and waves him off. “Pull it up, please.” A recording appears on the screen of the lab. Tony’s sitting with his back to the wall on the left of the screen, next to a car and an open toolbox. He’s staring at the ceiling, hardly blinking. JARVIS speeds through the video, stopping about ten minutes later when Dummy bumps into Tony’s leg carrying a tennis ball. It takes him almost half a minute to get Tony’s attention, and when he does, all Tony does is toss the ball across the lab a few times before he stops taking it out of Dummy’s claw. After a few minutes, Dummy gives up and leaves the ball next to him. He watches as the recording shows him stand up and use the elevator to go to his floor. How he bumps into the doorframe, brushes his teeth, takes a pill, and lays down without an ounce of expression. JARVIS fast forwards again almost a half hour, and Tony opens his eyes, reaches over, and takes another pill.

He almost skips the next part. He knows that’s where it went wrong.

But he doesn’t. He watches as he shoves pills into his mouth and collapses on the bed. He watches as the video shows JARVIS trying to get his attention in every way possible. He watches as his body finally realizes all the lights are on and the shades are open, and he watches as he stumbles toward the elevator. Steve catches him gently and panics and runs toward medical, and he can’t keep watching. It feels like static is running through his body.

The video closes, and he puts the device back on the table. “JARVIS, who has accessed that footage?”

“Just you and Dr. Banner, sir.”

It’s both a scare and a relief, and he closes his eyes for a bit. Even without the sight of the sterilized room, his head hurts, like he hasn’t gotten enough sleep. He knows Bruce will be back soon and he’ll want to talk, but he would like nothing more than to shut off the lights and sleep for another week. The feeling that it would solve all his problems lingers even as he weakly tries to shove it away. That was what caused this in the first place.

He hears Bruce come back into the room. Maybe if he keeps his eyes closed and doesn’t move, he’ll think he went back to sleep. “Tony.” A tray is set down, and he reluctantly opens his eyes. “How are you feeling?” He looks at Bruce, and they both stare at each other for a second. He knows he looks like shit. Even with a few days under the most pristine medical care in the country, his bones feel like they’re about to sink through the floor, and there’s not enough energy to even try to muster half a smile. His friend sighs. “I added some protocols to JARVIS. You can look over them, but I’d really appreciate it if you don’t change anything.” They look at each other for a little while longer. “Someone will be in to check your vitals soon, and you’ll probably be allowed to leave later today. JARVIS also contacted your psychiatrist and made an appointment, and it’s on your calendar.” This was what he liked about Bruce. He knew he wouldn’t talk, so he just gave the rundown of what happened and what needed to be done. He understood how it felt to wake up disoriented.

The doctor is in within minutes of Bruce’s departure. She checks everything, and declares him healthy, which he almost laughs at. Healthy people don’t do this. Healthy people are fine when they are surrounded with friends and support; he isn’t one of them. At best, he’s an old television, just switched off with a faint glow of the picture and the crackle of static across the screen, not quite gone yet but fading fast.

The entire team is in the hallway when he steps out of the room, dressed in some sweats and a shirt that Bruce left on the chair. He opens the door and stops, taking them in, and no one says a word. There’s varying degrees of concern down the line, and he tries and fails to give them his meet the press grin. Steve looks like he’s about to say something, so he settles for a thumbs up instead, cutting him off, and heads the elevator. “Workshop, J.” He knows he’s disappointing them.

He avoids Steve for two days. He avoids the whole team, and he knows they think that means nothing has changed; they all look at him every time he goes back to the workshop instead of staying for dinner. He can’t blame them, but JARVIS is programmed to make sure he takes everything he needs to take and to call someone if he doesn’t. Bruce also made sure the AI would be able to alert someone if Tony did something stupid for a third time. He doesn’t do anything in the workshop, mostly just sits with the bots and stares into space with less brain fog than before. He’s not spiraling, but he’s not doing better. He’s drifting.

He doesn’t want to die, he decides. He never really wanted to. It’s just that things kept overwhelming him and he didn’t have the strength to stop them. He told Rhodey he’d get better in college when he was overworking himself in the lab during the day and blacking out at night. And he did, for the most part. After Afghanistan and the palladium poisoning and New York and Extremis, he worked on himself. There were a few false starts, to be sure, but his coping mechanisms got better. But somewhere in there, as he stayed away from the liquor cabinet and practiced breathing exercises after nightmares, another switch in his brain malfunctioned. It wasn’t Pepper’s fault they broke down. It wasn’t the team’s fault that he felt so far from control the first time, and it wasn’t their fault that he felt so close to numb now. It wasn’t really even his fault, he reasons, but it would be if he didn’t at least try to heal.

He makes it up to the kitchen at three in the morning for a cup of coffee and Steve is there, stirring milk on the stove like he’s been there for hours. It’s difficult to gauge his reaction when he realizes Tony is there, but if he has to guess, Steve looks panicked. “Tony?” He abandons the spoon and walks toward him. “Is everything okay?” Tony raises an eyebrow and continues toward the coffee pot, holding up his empty mug. He can’t blame the man for being on edge. It seems like every time they’re alone in the same room things take a turn for the worse. Steve relaxes minutely and returns to the stove.

He fills the mug and places it in the microwave, thinking about the conversation he’s been meaning to have since he woke up. “Bench me.” He says it quickly, and Steve draws in a sharp breath at his sudden words. “You of all people know that I’m a risk to myself and others, so bench me. Take me off the team.” The coffee mug is warm in his hands.

“Tony, I-“

“You know it’s the right thing to do.” They stare at each other, and Tony feels like he can read Steve’s mind. If he’s not functional, it’s a risk to have him on the team. But benching him indefinitely could lead to something worse; in fact, it already had. But denying his request would be a rejection of sorts, which wouldn’t send the right message. The microwave beeps behind Tony, but he doesn’t look at it.

Steve deflates a little and runs his fingers through his hair. “I’ll take you off the active roster, but you’re still a member of the team. I don’t want to make any permanent decisions right now.”

Permanent decisions. The irony of the phrase rings in Tony’s ears, but instead of deflecting with his normal anger, all he can feel is regret. “I’ll try, Cap.” The microwave beeps again, and he removes his coffee, now steaming. “I will,” he says again, and he hopes the sincerity beneath his words is audible.

He talks with his psychiatrist in the tower’s meeting room. Tells her about the sleeping, the skipping pills, and the slipping back into old habits. She listens to him explain how the antidepressants were working, but that he needed the rest to keep up with the rest of his responsibilities. “Tony, if you had told me that you were having this much trouble, I could have prescribed something else. There are other ways to help you sleep.” She looks so kind and reassuring and a wave of shame washes over him. After a few sessions, they come to a compromise. Tony will keep taking the same medicine, with the same dose, and she’ll prescribe him another pill, one to help with sleep. JARVIS will have control over the sleeping tablets, so that there won’t be a repeat of the earlier situation. “And if you feel that you’re getting to that point,” she says, “call me immediately, and we’ll figure something out.” Tony agrees. He also gives JARVIS the ability to make the call, because if he’s learned anything, it’s that he’s rarely aware of his own emotions until he’s too far gone. He doesn’t want to be that far gone ever again.

Tony doesn’t talk about it with the Avengers. They know enough. But as long as they see things getting better, they don’t need to always know the details. Pepper comes by that week to check in and gives him a hug and a few files to sign. “The company is fine,” she reassures him, and her hand is warm on his shoulder. Even Rhodey flies by for a few days, landing on the platform and rushing into the living space where Tony is playing cards with Bruce. The force of his hug nearly lifts Tony off the ground, but it’s comfortable and amazing and it’s Rhodey. Tony’s grin almost cracks his face in half.

There are still bad days. There are still smiles that fade like bruises, but sometimes, there is laughter. The pills do exactly what they did when he first started taking them, but with the additional medicine, he’s able to fall asleep at night. He’s a little foggy in the mornings, but his doctor talks to him about the dosage, and he finally feels like he’s in control. It takes a while before the others stop tiptoeing around him and checking with JARVIS when he spends the whole day in the lab without emerging, but they adjust. He always finds someone inviting him up for a meal or a snack, and even when he rejoins the roster and they’re out flying missions again, they check in. They come home and debrief and take naps together on the couch, so no one has to be alone.

There are still nights where Tony sits next to Bruce and doesn’t hear a word of the movie. There are days when Nat comes down to the workshop just to sit and make small talk. Clint drinks coffee with him in the mornings and they play video games until their hands cramp. There are nights where he can’t sleep and he pads down to the kitchen and sits with Steve in silence. But there are also days where Nat teaches him how to throw knives and nights when he swaps stories about teenage mistakes with Clint. Sometimes he picks a movie for everyone to watch. He and Bruce sit in the workshop together and toss ideas back and forth just for the fun of it.

Some days, Tony wakes up with a clear mind. He gets dressed, checks the weather, and goes to the common floor instead of the workshop. The elevator opens, and he walks out, seeing Clint and Nat argue at the breakfast bar and Bruce watching them with amusement over the pages of a book. Steve is at the stove, making hot chocolate. He looks up as Tony enters, and smiles as he pours the drink into five different mugs. Clint grabs his, wincing as he tries to drink it too quickly, and Nat and Bruce share an eye roll as they wait for their cups to cool. Tony picks up one of the remaining mugs and sits in the empty chair next to Bruce, Steve doing the same next to him. The cocoa is warm and familiar and safe, and there’s a certain peace, a lightness that Tony can feel as he watches them. A future that spreads far beyond the next mission or the next year.

Piece by piece, Tony comes together again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading!! I started writing this back in October 2020 and finally finished it in January and it holds such a place in my heart.
> 
> I originally started this based on my experience with antidepressants (major insomnia) and was morbidly wondering how it would go if nothing changed, and so this idea was born.
> 
> Hope you liked it as much as I loved writing it :)


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